Witch Hat Atelier Is The Only Cozy Fantasy We Need This Summer
The year’s best new anime just capped off a stellar season — and there’s more on the way.
There’s no shortage of epic fantasy anime out there, but it’s not often one breaches containment to become an inescapable word-of-mouth sensation. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End was one such hit earlier this year, and though its second season came to an end this past spring, Crunchyroll has delivered another engrossing adventure to fill the void it left behind. That’s Witch Hat Atelier — if you haven’t been inundated with recommendations for the show already, let this be your first (and hopefully only) reminder. Because this cozy coming-of-age anime, set in an alternate world where witches perform mysterious magical acts, really is that good. In fact, it might be the best new anime of the year.
Shonen anime — stories typically made for and about adolescent boys — are usually the type that dominate the zeitgeist. Witch Hat Atelier shares some connective tissue with that genre in that it follows a young protagonist on a journey into a wider world, one rife with dangers, conspiracies, and an angsty rival waiting to one-up them at every turn. But it’s less common to see the female-fronted answer to that trope, and rarer still for a story about young magical girls to be classified as a seinen anime, which is aimed at teens and adults.
After its first episode, however, it’s clear why this tale (created by mangaka Kamome Shirahama) was such a popular manga and a just-as-engrossing anime. Her heroine, Coco, might be young and naive, but the catalyst that kickstarts her magical training is bracingly mature. It’s not hard to think of the heroes’ journeys in Star Wars or Harry Potter when brought into Shirahama’s alternate world, a parallel for Great Britain where witches perform magical feats but mostly keep to themselves. The strict rules of their society forbid any non-magic user from witnessing the methods of casting spells, which elevates the witches of the world to mythic status, not unlike a Jedi.
Coco, the daughter of a seamstress, has grown up enamored with magic. As a child, she longed to become a witch — but as she’s grown older, all that’s left of her dream is a magic coloring book she bought off a kindly peddler years prior. It’s not until the witch Qifrey turns up at her mother’s shop that her destiny finally comes into focus. When she sneakily watches Qifrey create a spell to repair a broken carriage, Coco discovers the secret of magic itself. Spells aren’t built on difficult incantations or the wave of a wand; they’re essentially sigils drawn on objects, albeit with a certain level of finesse. Anyone could technically perform magic if they knew the right sigil to draw — and Coco quickly learns about the “wrong” kind of magic when she dusts off her old coloring book (which is filled with forbidden spells hiding in plain sight), starts drawing a random spell, and accidentally petrifies her home within a cavern of ice.
A relatively simple magic system gives way to a sophisticated adventure in Witch Hat Atelier.
Qifrey saves Coco just in time, but Coco’s mother isn’t nearly so lucky. Both she and the forbidden book of spells are trapped in stasis, which means that not even a savant like Qifrey can do anything to reverse this spell. As Coco later learns, witches are held to a high standard. Spells that alter physical bodies, among other things, have been outlawed for centuries — but there’s a cabal of witches working in the shadows to upend that order, and that forbidden book was the first of many attempts to bring the old ways back.
If you’ve watched any popular modern anime (from My Hero Academia to Jujutsu Kaisen), the bare bones of this adventure aren’t hard to anticipate. All these stories come from the same well of ideas: a clandestine society, governed by rules that hurt more than they help, and a plucky outsider poised to find a happy medium between the evil disruptors and the well-meaning elite. Coco becomes the latter when Qifrey whisks her off to his atelier, vowing to make her his new apprentice and work to find the spell that could set her mother free.
As she joins a trio of girls who are far more advanced in the language of magic, Coco initially struggles, much to the amusement of her roommate, a moody prodigy named Agott. With a mixture of stubborn resolve and truly out-of-the-box thinking, though, it doesn’t take long for Coco to become instrumental at the atelier. Her journey from novice to witch is rewarding to watch, of course, but it’s the other aspects of Witch Hat Atelier that elevate this fantasy out of paint-by-numbers territory and into the realm of true, intoxicating novelty.
Coco’s journey brings a well-worn subgenre back to basics.
It helps that Coco’s new teacher is the kind of pretty-boy protagonist that all but forces one to pay attention: in so many ways, Qifrey feels like the reincarnation of Jujutsu Kaisen’s Gojo, another mysterious mentor with stark-white hair and incredible power. But the comparisons between Witch Hat Atelier and JJK end there, if only because the latter has always been too concerned with power-ups and aura. JJK is a stunning series, but my eyes glaze over any time the pacing grinds to a halt to explain yet another new power scale.
Witch Hat Atelier balances its style (rendered lovingly by Bug Films) with carefully constructed substance. Its magic system is sophisticated but simple enough to follow — it’s more about how the rules inadvertently oppress non-magic users, and the duty that witches have to everyday citizens, than flexing power for the sake of it. In its first season, Qifrey struggles with that balance, alongside what might be a subtle pull to less savory forms of magic. Meanwhile, his apprentices embark on adventures of the week, honing their skills in battles with dragons, through endless labyrinths, and more. Its grasp on the epic is just as keen as its interest in the mundane, proving the stellar potential of a story that’s already beloved by fans the world over. With a new season on the way, Coco’s journey has only just begun, but Witch Hat Atelier makes those first steps well worth the investment.
